DailyDirt: Robot Scientists

from the urls-we-dig-up dept

People are usually pretty quick to admit that artificial intelligence programs are better than most humans at solving a lot of math problems. Human scientists have generally been needed to interpret data and make conclusions, but AI software could be catching up with scientists by coming up with their own hypotheses and conclusions. Here are just a few examples of programs that might be writing up their own PhD dissertations someday. By the way, StumbleUpon can recommend some good Techdirt articles, too.
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Filed Under: adam, ai, biology, conjectures, eureqa, eve, graffiti, math, orphan enzyme, robots, scientists, software, yeast genetics


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  1. icon
    Tom Landry (profile), 17 Jan 2012 @ 6:01pm

    Michael, just to drop a quick note of appreciation for your piece here on the site each evening. Its one of the few things I look forward to after the daily burnout of politics and vapid "entertainment" news on many mainstream sites.

    Carry on ;)

    link to this | view in thread ]

  2. identicon
    Anonymous Coward, 17 Jan 2012 @ 6:26pm

    I read another interesting article about Eureqa a while back:

    http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/robot_invasion/2011/09/robot_invasion_can_computer s_replace_scientists_.single.html

    It's part of a series on humans being replaced by computers, so it focuses more on the part where Eureqa solved a problem and nobody could figure out how the solution worked.

    link to this | view in thread ]

  3. identicon
    Rekrul, 17 Jan 2012 @ 6:38pm

    Adam is the first automated scientist -- successfully developing a hypothesis, performing experiments, refining its hypothesis into a novel discovery.

    A newer version of Adam, called Eve, is sifting through some of Adam's data and looking to find her own discoveries about yeast genetics.

    Jeez, even in the computer world, women have to have the last word! ;)

    link to this | view in thread ]

  4. identicon
    Anonymous Coward, 17 Jan 2012 @ 7:32pm

    For more mundane tasks like finding the optimal set of rules to encode a video file you get mencgen

    Quote:
    mencgen is a Java application designed to explore the mencoder options space. Using a genetic algorithm, it tries to find out the options combination that give the best PSNR (Peak Signal to Noise Ratio) for a given file and a given bitrate.


    Genetic programming is cool.

    link to this | view in thread ]

  5. icon
    Michael Ho (profile), 19 Jan 2012 @ 12:01am

    Re:

    Tom,

    Thanks for reading! Hopefully you're not the only one who likes these tidbits of random info... :P

    mikeho

    link to this | view in thread ]


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